This invention concerns improvements in or relating to ammunition for small arms such as pistols, revolvers, rifles and like firearms.
It is known to use practice ammunition in which the explosive charge is reduced as compared with standard ammunition for various purposes, e.g. practicing shooting indoors, target shooting at fairgrounds and training, in order to obtain a reduction in the dangers involved, but even when the charge is reduced to the minimum necessary to achieve reasonable accuracy during firing, the bullet, due to its weight, still has a dangerous amount of kinetic energy. In order to reduce the kinetic energy, it has been proposed to use plastics bullets instead of the usual metal bullets, but it has been found that the accuracy is reduced when plastic bullets are used. Also, it is known to sleeve down a large caliber handgun to a smaller caliber by means of a barrel liner, to enable missiles of lower kinetic energy to be used, but such conversions require the firing chamber and magazine of the gun to be modified.
The costs involved in using such forms of ammunition are high because all these rounds of ammunition comprise a cartridge casing, a primer, the explosive charge, and the missile, all of which are expended during firing.
Various inventions have recently been made by the Inventor in order to try and further reduce said dangers and to avoid reductions in said costs.
In one of said inventions the Inventor proposed to use a barrel liner and a standard air gun pellet of 0.177 or 0.22 caliber in order to employ a lightweight low cost mass produced missile, in combination with a form of cartridge which contained a compressed air chamber and valve means to enable the compressed air to be released for propelling the missile from a mouth at the front or nose end of the cartridge. The compressed air chamber and valve means were designed to be rechargable with compressed air. However, such air gun pellets have a relatively fragile and easily damaged thin skirt at the trailing end of the missile. It was found by the inventor, during testing, that the skirt could be damaged as it was loaded skirt first into the mouth, so that the pellet faced forward ready to be fired out of the mouth. Also, recharging of the cartridge with compressed air had to be performed under clinically clean conditions. Otherwise, the valve means could become faulty due to the presence of dirt and foreign matter.
However, the rechargable compressed air ammunition had great advantages when compared with the known explosive practise ammunition. There was a great reduction in the kinetic energy necessary to achieve accurate shooting, there was no pollution, and only the pellets were expended as the cartridge was rechargable, but the cartridge was relatively expensive to produce.
What is still needed is a form of practice ammunition which is relatively inexpensive to produce, and inexpensive to use, which affords as many as possible of the advantages of the known practice ammunition and the compressed air rechargable round of ammunition proposed by the Inventor, and which enables the aforementioned disadvantages to be reduced or to be avoided.